West Ham United are likely to be named preferred bidders for the Olympic Stadium in Stratford on Wednesday following a board meeting of the London Legacy Development Corporation, but final agreement on a deal for the East End club to move into the £429m venue is expected to remain some way off.

As revealed last month by the Guardian the LLDC board, chaired by the London mayor, Boris Johnson, was split on the best way forward ahead of the latest D-day in a long and protracted saga that has endured a succession of false dawns.

West Ham believe that only Premier League football can make the stadium economically viable and deliver a lasting legacy for the surrounding area. Johnson feels that West Ham offer the best solution but is equally adamant that the deal must make sense for the public purse.

But others believe that if West Ham are unwilling to further increase their upfront contribution to the conversion budget then an alternative option to press on without football and stage athletics, concerts and other one-off sporting events at the stadium should be pursued. That would require only £38m to be spent converting the stadium and allow it to reopen in 2014 rather than 2015 or even 2016. It is understood that, despite an increased offer from West Ham, further progress needs to be made on filling a gap of between £20m and £40m in the £160m-plus cost of converting the stadium so that it is suitable for both football and athletics.

There is also concern over how to structure any deal to ensure that the public purse benefits if the club, likely to benefit from the increased capacity and improved location, are later sold at a profit. A mechanism would have to be found to lock West Ham into the lease in the event of the club being sold.

The likely outcome is that West Ham will get preferred bidder status but with a number of conditions attached before contracts can be signed. These could include a requirement to fill the funding hole. A similar deal was struck with iCity for the expansive media centre in the north of the Park. Under that agreement, the iCity consortium agreed to sign up to a range of promises on the number of jobs it would create and the amount it would invest. Meanwhile, the film director Danny Boyle has added his name to the list of those backing West Ham's bid to rent the stadium on a 99-year lease. Boyle said in his director's commentary for the BBC's Opening Ceremony DVD that he included a sequence featuring I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles because he hoped they would move in.

"We had to have the West Ham song because I think they should get the stadium. It would be wonderful. I hope the park is made into a big success by the fact the onus is on them now to keep investing and to keep it working because people love it," he said.